Chris Hemsworth Talks Playing ‘Fat Thor’ And Why He Almost Quit ‘Ghostbusters’

By Corey Atad.
28 May 2019 10:21 AM

Chris Hemsworth. Photo: Variety

Chris Hemsworth’s loved playing “fat Thor.”

The actor is on the cover of the new issue of Variety, and in the feature story he talks about putting the hilarious, paunchy spin on his godly hero for “Avengers: Endgame”.

“Physically, it was a good three hours in hair and makeup,” he says. “Then the prosthetic suit, particularly for the shirt-off scene, that was a big silicone that weighed about 90 pounds. It was certainly exhausting. I had weights on my hands and ankles just to have my arms and legs swing differently when I shuffled along through the set.”

The “fat Thor” look also got Hemsworth a lot of love from his co-stars, though sometimes it got to be a little much.

“People just kept coming up and cuddling me like a big bear or rubbing my belly like I was pregnant,” he recalls. “Or trying to sit on my lap like I was Santa Claus. You get a lot of affection. I felt like an old man, an old grandpa, with a bunch of kids around. And then you get sick of it when people come up and grab your belly. ‘Don’t grab me like that!’ I know how my wife felt when strangers would come up and rub her belly.”

Hemsworth adds that he’s not done playing Thor just yet, telling Variety, “I’d still love to do more, to be honest. And I don’t know what the plan is. I feel like we’ve opened up such a different character. I feel more energized for the possibility of where it could go.”

The 35-year-old also talks about how he very nearly quit the 2016 “Ghostbusters” reboot.

“The night before I was shooting, I almost pulled out,” he says. “Three or four weeks prior, Paul [Feig] said to me, ‘I’m going to write up the character. Don’t worry.’ And then I got the script and nothing had changed.”

Hemsworth’s agent got him a meeting with the writer-director, who assured him that much of the character would actually be improvised on-set.

“I was really scared walking onto that set. I had no real plan, so I was just feeding off of them, and I just felt ridiculous. So I used that,” the actor says.